(Suzanne Kawola/Life@Home)
Chef Custer in his favorite place ? the kitchen

(Suzanne Kawola/Life@Home)
Chef Custer in his favorite place ? the kitchen

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(Suzanne Kawola/Life@Home)
Chef Custer shucking oyesters

(Suzanne Kawola/Life@Home)
Chef Custer shucking oyesters

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(Suzanne Kawola/Life@Home)
Smoked Brisket Fritatta

(Suzanne Kawola/Life@Home)
Smoked Brisket Fritatta

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Custer's new stand: The life of history buff/chef Sean Custer

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History fires Sean Custer's imagination and feeds his soul. The chef and restaurateur does not eschew contemporary amenities; he has a late-model computer and flat-panel TV, for instance. But anything of permanence and emotional value in his life, from objects to ideas to the cuisine with which he makes his living, connects to the past.

He lives in an Albany neighborhood in the first-floor apartment of a century-old home that's a 3-minute walk from his restaurant, Capital Q Smokehouse. The two-bedroom flat is crammed with stuff gleaned from garage sales, which he enjoys and his extended family is zealous about.

"I'd say everything in here except the computer and the TV is from a garage sale," he says. His family shops them with such industriousness that they've coined a term for it: goin' salein'. He has an array of the halfmoon-bladed choppers called mezzalunas, scores of cookbooks, a 1913 Seal Crest ice-cream scoop and a sterling-silver Dunhill cigarette lighter that has been appraised at a hundred times the $5 he paid for it.

Old pots and pans -- of course found at garage sales -- line racks across a wall in Custer's kitchen: copper ones the color of old pennies, bright but battered aluminum, cast iron seasoned to nonstick perfection from years of use. "I love my cast iron," Custer says. "Who needs Teflon?" (He clearly doesn't: A frittata he'll make later leaves not a speck of cooked-on food inside the cast-iron skillet.)

A native of Long Island, Custer, now 46, relocated with his family to Oklahoma at age 12, staying in the Sooner State until graduating from college with a liberal-arts degree. The bachelor's diploma was meant to lead to law school, though to his parents' dismay he instead moved to New York City to pursue a career in restaurant kitchens, which had helped pay his way through college.

He spent 20 years in the city and Westchester, working for boutique hotels and country clubs, until a move upstate was prompted in 2004 by, as he says, "a woman who is no longer in my life." He worked in catering locally for a few years, but after decades of making fussy French food for fine-dining affairs, Custer was craving something simpler, more elemental: the barbecue he grew up in Oklahoma.

Barbecue is the antithesis of complicated contemporary cooking. Just meat, seasoning, smoke and fire, barbecue's essence goes back millennia. Thus it is suited to a chef with a fondness for the past (he's a descendant of a brother of Gen. George Custer). And it is most appropriate that he was able to build his restaurant in what for 75 years had been the former Meister's Meat Market, complete with a walk-in smoker than can handle 600 pounds of meat at a time. Because the Northeast lacks a distinct barbecue tradition or inviolate allegiance to a certain preparation, Custer devised a menu for Capital Q that shows off specialties from North and South Carolina, Memphis, Oklahoma and Texas.

The latter, in the form of beef brisket that is hardwood-smoked for 14 hours, stars in the hearty, thick frittata that is tonight's entree. The meal starts with boiled peanuts -- he's tinkering with his recipe for the Southern snack classic before introducing it at the restaurant -- plus oysters smoked over hardwood sawdust. Custer uses a Norwegian smoker the size of a hardcover book, designed to fit in a backpack and be set over a campfire, that dates to the middle of the last century. For dessert, Custer simply sautes bananas -- in cast iron, of course -- adds coconut milk and powdered sugar, and garnishes with a scoop of vanilla ice cream rolled in Ovaltine powder.

The chef loves Ovaltine as immoderately as he does garage sales. "See this?" he says, holding a jar of the malt-and-cocoa milk flavoring. "They say this has 16 servings. They lie. This is four servings," likely the result of Custer drinking pints of the stuff at a time. There are four more jars in the pantry, which, in the Custer household, qualifies as dangerously low. "We're on a yellow alert for an Ovaltine shortage," he says.

Meals take place at a Mission-style dining set: heavy, dark table and chairs designed a century ago, when the Arts and Crafts movement offered the respite of simplicity after the decor excesses of the Victorian era. "It's the only thing I got in the divorce," Custer says. The matching china cabinet holds bottles of spirits, including several examples of his favorite variety, bourbon, and a few oddities given him by a friend of his mother's, among them Cuban rum and Scandinavian aquavit, both dating from the 1950s.

Newer in Custer's life is tonight's dinner guest, Annie Parisella. They met in that most new-fashioned of ways, online. He posted a long, witty ad that said he could use the word "defenestrate" in a sentence, was as handy with chopsticks as a chainsaw, owned a barbecue restaurant and wanted a woman whose attributes included knowing the difference between Bordeaux and bearnaise and having a shapely posterior (this last was put more colorfully).

"I had to respond," she says. She loved barbecue, had lived in Oklahoma, wanted a rugged, confident man and was smitten by the ad's tone. (And soon enough by its writer.) "When we first met, it felt like we'd known one another for years. It was kismet." Among their unlikely mutual fascinations: explosives.

"There is nothing like watching a building implode," says Parisella, whose brother works in demolition.

Near the dining table sits a 1911 heating stove from Custer's grandparents. Now a valuable decorative piece -- he has found similar models for sale for $6,000 -- the stove one day could warm a cabin in the Adirondacks. They've got their eye on a spot in Thurman, Warren County, which, alas, isn't yet for sale. When it is, they plan to pounce. "I'd have my land, my chainsaw, my smoker, my ATV, my dogs and my woman," says Custer.

Says Parisella, "I'm in."

Custer smiles at her and says, "I'd be happy."

RECIPES:

Sauteed Banana In Coconut Milk with Ovaltine-Encrusted Ice Cream

ingredients:

4 bananas, peeled and split lengthwise

6 ounces coconut milk (not coconut cream)

1 ounce confectioner's sugar

4 scoops vanilla ice cream

1 ounce Ovaltine powder (orange label, chocolate malt flavor)

2 tablespoons butter or vegetable oil

method:

Saute bananas 1 or 2 minutes on each side, just enough to color.

Add coconut milk and powdered sugar. Simmer one minute.

Plate bananas and drizzle with sauce. Roll ice cream in Ovaltine and then add to bananas on plate.

Roast Pepper and Black Bean Salsa

ingredients:

1 cup cooked black beans, rinsed. Canned will work but home cooked is better.

2 green bell peppers, roasted, peeled, seeded and diced

2 red bell peppers, roasted, peeled, seeded and diced

4 jalapeno peppers roasted, peeled, seeded and diced

4 ripe tomatoes, peeled and diced

1 onion, diced

1/2 bunch fresh cilantro chiffonade

4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

Fresh lime juice to taste

1/2 teaspoon ground cumin

Salt and pepper to taste

method:

Combine all ingredients and allow mix to site overnight for best flavor. Then check and adjust seasoning to taste.

Boiled Peanuts

ingredients:

2 pounds green peanuts (raw/unroasted)

1 gallon water

6 tablespoons salt

method:

Thoroughly wash peanuts until the water runs clear. Soak the peanuts for six hours. Weigh down to keep them submerged. Combine water and salt. Add peanuts and bring to a boil. Then reduce to a simmer. Keep peanuts submerged!

Simmer 3-5 hours until peanuts are soft. Fresh peanuts may be ready sooner; older may need more time. Drain and eat, hot or cold. Enjoy with beer and barbecue. Keeps 3-5 days in refrigerator but can be frozen almost indefinitely (up to one year, but you will eat them before then!)

Add scrambled egg mixture and diced peppers. Stir just enough to incorporate all the ingredients. Continue to cook on stovetop for one minute. Then transfer to oven. Cook until eggs are set, about 15 minutes. Remove from oven. Allow to rest for 2 minutes. Enjoy hot or cold.

Hickory Smoke Oysters

ingredients:

100 oysters, scrubbed

Hickory fire,

Preferably large burlap sack, wet, or antique Norwegian camping smoker. To this right you might have to do some McGyvering, but if you get the concept, you'll figure out a way to do it.

method:

Build a large fire, using well-seasoned hardwood, like hickory, or you could use hickory instead or, failing that, use some hickory. Let the fire burn down to coals. Shovel some coals into your Weber grill, hibachi, your spouse's favorite all-clad roasting pan, whatever. Fill it with hickory embers.

Slap a grate over it, but not too high. This sucker should be hot! Arrange the oysters on the grill so that the curved shell half is on the bottom to retain as much juice as possible. Cover with the wet burlap.

Oysters should pop open within 3-5 minutes. Do not overcook! If they do not pop open, wait a little longer but not too long. (If they still don't open, they are suspect and should be thrown at politicians.)